I am an evil giraffe. Who no longer blogs about politics.

For those living in a cave, Charlie Rangel* (D, NY) is about to get served with ethics charges by the House Ethics committee for committing ethical violations (mostly involving real estate) beyond the power of the House Ethics committee leadership to plausibly overlook… not that they didn’t try their best. In keeping with this tradition of benign overlooksight, it turns out that Rangel met with the Ethics Committee Chair Zoe Lofgren (D, CA) without any pesky Republicans around to hear about any particular deals that Rangel might or might not have been willing to make to avoid embarrassing the Democratic party in public. I can’t imagine why the GOP would be worried about that, though: it’s not like Rangel gave three Democratic members of the Ethics Committee campaign money… oh. Right. He did.

The report is now that there will be no resignation, that there was no deal made, and if the Democrats want to try him for ethics charges they can just go ahead and do that. I enthusiastically endorse this stance of Rep. Rangel’s. I would also like to remind the Republican members of the Ethics Committee:

Jo Bonner

Mike Conaway

Charles Dent

Gregg Harper

Michael McCaul

…that sparing the feelings of Charlie Rangel is a particularly poor hill for a Republican to die on. I encourage them to consider that truth most seriously, should Chairwoman Lofgren suddenly remember their existence and attempt to recruit any of them in a scheme to let that old warhorse of the House down easy.